Links of the Week: July 23, 2012

Very light week this week. One addition to the Hall of Fame and a few videos. I really haven’t had time to read blogs this week.

The new aggregator has been open for a couple days now (if you have me circled on google+ you may have seen the link) for a preview, though it’s not quite ready for prime time. I’m working on that this weekend and will hopefully have more to show shortly.

QuestContact, the person or source of information regarding the adventure;

The Adventure, the nature or goal of the adventure;

The Location, the primary setting of the adventure;

The Macguffin, theitem (if any) that is the focus of the adventure;

The Innocents, characters or creatures related to the adventure, neither protagonist or antagonist but likely sympathetic;

The Antagonists, the primary opposition in the adventure;

The Twists and Complications, because if it was straightforward it would hardly be an adventure;

The Dramatic Conflict, what isbad about successfully completing the adventure.

The entries in the tables are generally fairly abstract. For instance, The Location contains:

Bandit Territory

Mansion or Estate

Swamp/Flooded Area

Island

A Fortress

Scalding Desert

An Overgrown Forest

Urban

Mountains/Caves

Jail/Detention Camp

Ocean

Underground

with a brief description of what it means and some of the things to keep in mind while designing the adventure.

This can provide a bare skeleton with lots of room to hang detail from. Looking the tables over, I think it could do a lot to prod my thinking into paths other than I would likely come up with on my own. Combine it with some of the other random generators (such as the lot at Seventh Sanctum) for names and some other elements, and you have tools to help do a lot of the high-level design work.

Obviously you don’t need to roll on all tables, and you might want to roll more than once on a table to complicate things. Perhaps the adventure spans several Locations, or a Location consists of multiple elements (a Fortress in a Desert, a Mansion in the Swamp, a Prison Island). There might be multiple Antagonists — whether they cooperate with each other or not, they certainly don’t want the protagonists to succeed.

Kickstarter

A Japanese horror dark fantasy campaign setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Reading Usagi Yojimbo for the last twenty years or so has given me a great interest in Japanese mythology and horror, so I’m likely to back this one after I have a chance to review the project. I’m tempted to do it just on what it is, but I really should look more closely.

But I’m probably going to end up doing it.

Project closes September 16, currently 2,165/4,000 funded.

Videos

#DIRTYLAUNDRY

I can’t really describe it better than the person who passed the link on to me.

So it turns out that the single greatest “Punisher” film is a fan film.

…Starring… the actor who played the Punisher in the terrible 2004 bomb?

AND RON PERLMAN??? HOLY CRAP!

Not for the faint of heart, this is pretty unpleasant, and very, very badass.

100 Riffs (A Brief History of Rock N’ Roll)

I have to think this would have been difficult. One hundred distinct songs in different styles and modes of playing… in one 12-minute take.

I’d have trouble keeping them straight at all, let alone switching them up cleanly, especially considering the number of quick adjustments he makes to the guitar configuration as he goes.

I think he does a really good job of this. The places that don’t seem spot on are generally those where the song really wants backing instruments, but he does a surprisingly good job of adapting.

Deadpool: The Game – SDCC 2012 Trailer

More Deadpool fun. Last week a fan video, this week the trailer for the game from High Moon.

Not a game suitable for children, but it does look like it has its moments. Though I do agree with the comment “There is no middle ground; this is going to be amazing or terrible”, I have to say that I like the line,

5 Comments

I loved Dirty laundry pretty much as much as I hated the 2004 flick. And I loved the source material for it, Garth Ennis did a great job, but whoever tried to adapt it just missed on so many levels what it the Punisher could have been.

I hope you do check out the Kaidan Campaign Setting Kickstarter – I am the concept creator and cartographer for Kaidan. Visit Rite Publsihing at the Paizo Store or DrivethruRPG and you’ll see we already have 11 products released for Kaidan already, including a free one-shot adventure. Please read the reviews, there are lots of good ones. Based on my Japanese heritage, love of history, ghost stories, RPG and a need to get the details right – is why I created it.